staticx57

wizard69 said:

ericthehalfbee said:

repressthis said:

Do you commenters imagine the big.LITTLE architecture to become standard for Apple moving forward? 

I doubt this is big.little, but rather a superior implementation by Apple. They even hinted at this by mentioning their custom performance controller at the announcement.

big.little isn't nearly as good as people think, especially with the overhead you get if you put a thread onto the wrong core and want to move it later.

I have to agree that people are jumping the gun calling this big.LITTLE. Im thinking more along the lines of a four core SMP that isn't so symmetric. In stead we have four equal core with two simply clocked much lower in speed.

a bit of hardware I place to manage when high performance is called for and to ramp up the fast cores as required.   Why would Apple do this! To me the obvious reason is iPad and other higher performance machines, with a little tweaking, maybe even as simple as a fuse, you suddenly have a four core chip with all cores running full out.  

im not a a fan of big.LITTLE, at least not in current implementations so I'm really hoping Apple did something different here.  

paxman said:

I am super happy about the removal of the audio jack. When I get my iPhone 7 no-one in my house can steal and lose my headphones! For maybe a year, hopefully longer I will be the only one who can use my Lightning headset. There are two Apple products I buy repeatedly, and always more than one at the time - charging cables and head phones. The headphones will no longer be an issue. I wish they had changed the main culprit - the Lightning charging cable. Shoulda been wireless.

hexclock said:

Wireless charging, in my opinion, is still very much a gimmick at this point. The device needs to be in contact with, or in very close proximity to, the charging pad. If you could walk around the house freely and have it charge, then you'd have something useful. I would rather take the extra 1.3 seconds to plug my phone in, and not burn my house down.  

vision33r said:

staticx57 said:

williamlondon said:

bsimpsen said:

netrox said:

What is surprising is that iPhone 7 Plus is already FASTER than iPad Pro! Just think how it keeps getting faster and faster with no signs of leveling off at all. So, I can see how Apple may eventually use ARM chips in future Macs. Their chip is just way MUCH faster in terms of performance per watt. 

Yep, the iPhone 7 is faster than the entry level MacBook, on both single (3233 vs. 2668) and multi-core (5363 vs. 4886). It's faster than the top line MacBook on single core (3233 vs. 2831) and fairly close on multi-core (5363 vc. 6008). Two more years of this kind of improvement and the iPhone might be benchmarking better than half the Mac line. Something's gotta give.

Imagine they didn't throttle it in a device that had more cooling and wattage available (did I get that right?) with which to contend, such as the AppleTV, or perhaps one day a laptop with A-series. Wonder how this would scream in one of those housings. Very impressive to get all that in a phone, how far before these mobile devices render the need for faster machines for the masses (not those who need power for work and such, but the email/social networking/internet browsing masses) moot?

Theres no secret to the A series, it is the transistor count. At 3.3 billion it is by far the largest cpu ever. It is quite a bit more than the A9 and 1 billion more than the A8. From Anandtech:

Apple SoC Evolution
	Die Size	Transistors	Process
A5	122m2	<1B	45nm
A6	97mm2	<1B	32nm
A7	102mm2	>1B	28nm
A8	89mm2	~2B	20nm
A9	96mm2/104.5mm2	>2B	14nm/16nm

For some other reference. The quad core i7 in my 2012 macbook pro retina has a paltry 1.4 billion transistors with a 1.2 billion transistor GPU. The thing is positively massive. Remember when the A7 came out and Apple said they were building desktop class CPUs, it is quite true.

Apples vs Oranges, you're comparing a CPU vs a SOC.  Of course a SOC will have more transistors.

Intel CPUs do not have radios, BT, nor disk controllers.